In a recent regional meeting of education leaders, a district curriculum director touted their subscription to EdPuzzle and praised its usefulness as a virtual learning tool. I did not say anything, but I sat thinking that we can do better than embedding questions into videos that students watch. This type of instruction does not meet clear criteria for effectiveness: 1) It is not student-centered; 2) It does not require students to meaningfully collaborate with their peers, where different perspectives become valuable; and 3) It is not inquiry-based, which requires students to make sense of phenomena and solve problems.
First, effective online learning (like learning in an in-person
classroom) is student-centered. Even if a teacher provides really thoughtful
questions for that video or questions for students to answer after a reading,
it is still the teacher doing the heavy lifting. The students are interpreting
what the teacher wants, not doing the cognitive work of creating or charting
their own path. If students are instead trying to make sense of a natural
occurrence in the world around them, a historical event, or an engineering
problem, their approach to a video or reading becomes their own. They delve
into that resource to find answers to their own questions—answers they need to
figure something out and answers that relate to their interests and identities—not
answers to simply complete a virtual worksheet on a topic.
But is that approach still standards-based? Yes. Much of the
school learning revolves around the idea that students need to be exposed to
particular concepts or content because those are the standards. No, that’s not
the goal. The goal underlying all standards is for students to be able to
figure out the world around them, engaging in some content learning along the
way in order to help them do that.
Second, effective online learning integrates meaningful student
collaboration. “Meaningful” is not finding the one correct answer together, nor
is it together replicating some near variation of the teacher’s example. Instead,
students bring their own perspectives and background knowledge to bear as they
make sense of something together—that can be seen in the science video on the lower left of
this website. Small-group, project-based learning can happen in virtual
and hybrid environments; typical structures
for group projects still work.
Third, effective online learning is inquiry-based. I recently
heard of a teacher dissecting a fetal pig, with the students watching
virtually. I could imagine the students saying, “ewww gross,” and appearing
pretty engaged. The teacher notes that this allows students to better learn and
visualize body parts. Okay, but why does that matter? Why is memorizing body
parts important? Instead, students might explore what causes organisms to die
and connect with a wildlife
parasitologist like Dr. Rebecca Cole. Student groups could use online
resources to visually explore failures in particular body systems in an animal
model and situation that interests them; as an example, Dr. Cole could walk
them through signs of parasites in a body and how they affect various systems.
Or, students might have a unit with a driving question of, “What, if anything,
is wrong with plastic products?” A local DNR scientist could virtually join
students and cut open a fish, together looking for plastics accumulation with
students making claims for where that might happen and why. Is it in brain,
liver, heart, muscles, blood, stomach, or intestines? Where and why do we find
plastic and chemicals from plastics breaking down? The partner DNR or
university scientist could use a gas chromatograph to test student ideas. It is
true that in virtual learning students cannot personally manipulate physical
scientific equipment, but they can still explore phenomena and see results of
tests of their ideas (though done by a proxy scientist or a simulation).
In the end, effective online learning is not critically different from
effective in-person learning.
